Sunday, 15 January 2017

Spartacus' Morphing Politics in Dark Times

The
weather is always appropriately dank and bitter on 15th January, the
anniversary of the brutal 1919 murders, by the far-right proto-Nazi volunteer Freikorps,
of the Spartacists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Their Spartacus Leaguetook
its name after splitting from the Social Democratic Party, which had supported
imperial Germany’s declaration of war. But I’ve never been able to discover
whether it was Rosa or Karl or indeed their colleague Clara Zetkin—a trained
Classics teacher—who chose the identification with the ancient Thracian slave.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

Spartacus,
as he is admiringly portrayed in Plutarch’s Life of Crasssus, was adopted as
ancestral hero of single-issue Abolitionists when Guillaume Raynal asked in 1770, ‘Where is this great man to be found? Where
is the new Spartacus who will not find Crassus?' His plea seemed to be answered when Toussaint
Louverture, aka The Black Spartacus, successfully led the 1791 slave rebellion
in Haiti. British children were introduced in 1822 to the paradigmatic
classical proto-Abolitionist via Spartacus: A Roman Story, by Englishwoman
Susanna Strickland (later to migrate to Canada, campaign against U.S. slavery
and find fame as Susanna Moodie).

But
Spartacus did not mutate from campaigner against slavery into campaigner against
capitalist oppression of workers until three decades later. The individual
responsible seems to have been Ernest Jones, Anglo-Welsh but Berlin-born Chartist
friend of Marx and Engels. He founded the short-lived weekly journal Notes
to the People (1851-2). Its fiftieth edition kicked off a three-part serial The Gladiators of Rome, narrating Spartacus’ revolt but turning it
into a paradigm of principled popular working-class uprising against the
super-rich.

'Mugshot' of Chartist Jones

This
was a radical move, since the Chartists and other working men’s organisations
had traditionally been suspicious of the anti-slavery societies whose hero was
Spartacus: the British working class thought that the Abolitionists were privileged
do-gooders crassly neglecting the exploitation of white workers in their own
back yard.

Spartakusbund attacks 3-headed hydra of capitalism

By
January 1st 1916, when the Spartakusbund
became official, Spartacus had therefore been a proto-socialist for a lifetime.
And 1916 was the year when Kirk Douglas was born—the actor who impersonated Stanley
Kubrick’s rousing Spartacusin 1960.

Draba selflessly spares Spartacus' life

The
politics of that film are stupefyingly confused: there are good reasons for
interpreting it as simultaneously pro-Israel and pro-Christian-Evangelical,
pro-civil-liberties and homophobic, as Anti-McCarthyite butAnti-Soviet but Pro-Trade-Union. It has one great scene for an African American
actor (Woody Strode as Draba) but otherwise presents Spartacus’ fellow slaves
as whiter than white. Let us not even talk about the women.

On reflection, it
seems a suitable enough film for the current bewildering political climate. Margarethe von Trotta's heartbreaking 1986 movie Rosa
Luxemburg suggests the politics of oppression are refreshingly straightforward but sadly doesn't seem to be on Netflix. So Spartacussounds like a plan for this winter afternoon.